Effects of contextual information on maintenance effort: A controlled experiment

• Published in: The Journal of systems and software 2020-01, Vol.159, p.110443, Article 110443
• Main Authors: D’Avila, Leandro Ferreira, Farias, Kleinner, Barbosa, Jorge Luis Victória
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Contextual information; Empirical study; Maintenance effort; Qualitative dashboard
• ISSN: 0164-1212; 1873-1228
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jss.2019.110443

•We report experiment about using contextual information in software maintenance.•The contextual information was provided through a qualitative dashboard.•Thirty subjects performed the activities and half of them used the dashboard.•The results suggest that the usage of contextual information improves the correctness.•The implementation efforts are reduced in 40.58% when using contextual information. There has been an increased focus on context-aware tools in software engineering. Within this area, an important challenge is to define and model the context for software-development projects and software development in general. This article reports a controlled experiment that compares the effort to implement changes, the correctness and the maintainability of an existing application between two projects; one that uses qualitative dashboards depicting contextual information, and one that does not. The results of this controlled experiment suggest that the usage of qualitative dashboards improves the correctness during the software maintenance activities and reduces the effort to implement these activities.